We're used to National Enquirer stories on "shocking" plastic surgery, but in 2010 the rag almost won a Pulitzer. Alex Pappademas chronicles its evolution from tabloid to breaking-news contender

'National Enquirer' executive editor Barry Levine works out of a guestbathroom-sized office on New York's East Side. The walls don't go all the way to the ceiling; the carpet is stain-colored. He's got a fax machine, a PC, and a blown-up Enquirer cover featuring the tear-puffy face of William Shatner (the truth about how my wife died). He's got enough tabloid back issues piled up in the corner to worry the Collyer brothers, and a comprehensive celebritybiography libraryKeanu, Martha Stewart, Don Rickles, Marie Osmond. The cheeseball paperbacks line the windowsill; the fancier "A Life"/"My Story"-type hardbacks occupy a shelf above Levine's desk.1

And he's got files. They run alphabetically: aguilera through bryant, couric through fox, leblanc through lopez, with one big drawer each devoted to the kennedys, obama family, and michael jackson. If you've ever been famous, Levine probably has paper on you, although there's also a good chance he can call up from memory that which you'd prefer be forgotten. "I don't think he even needs those files," says Enquirer senior reporter Alexander Hitchen. "He's got it all up here."

From this unassuming nerve center, Levine51, bald, with a crooked grin that has an unfortunate tendency to read as a Cheneyish smirk on TVruns the Enquirer's New York bureau. He fields tip-line calls, works sources, massages copy, and dispatches and directs Enquirer field reporters, including the team that broke the news of an affair between John Edwards and loopy videographer-with-benefits Rielle Hunter in 2007. Levine and his reporters beat everyone to the Edwards scoop; not since Bill Clinton's first "bimbo eruptions" has a supermarket tabloid so completely owned a major political story, which led a number of columnists, beginning with D.C.-based blogger Emily Miller, to suggest that the Enquirer's work on Edwards was worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.

So this past January, Levine submitted a collection of the paper's 2009 Edwards coverage"It took my assistant forever to find the right binders," he saysfor Pulitzer contention. The Pulitzer board briefly challenged the paper's eligibility, citing some language on the Enquirer's corporate parent's Web site calling it a "magazine," but finally relented.

The Pulitzer Prize! Journalism's highest honor that is not a book or movie deal! Possibly going to a scandalmongering checkout-counter rag! The very idea. But there is precedent, of a kind. Wasn't the New York Times's coverage of the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandalhonored last year in the breaking-news categorybasically a wellexecuted gossip story about a politician? And while many pundits have dismissed the campaign as a publicity stunt, others, like Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, have rallied behind the paper, crediting it with the kind of investigative industry that traditional newspapers, eviscerated by downsizing, won't or can't display anymore.

Besides, a Pulitzer for the Enquirer would make a kind of perfect, cosmic, karmic sense right now. We're living in a media moment where news outletsunder pressure to deliver eyeballs and ratingscan't afford to ignore stories they might once have dismissed as "gossip." The borders between news, "entertainment news," entertainment, and scandal have dissolved. (Levine believes this all started with O. J. Simpson's Bronco chasea tabloid story too big for the mainstream media to ignore.)

In his 2004 memoir, The Untold Story: My 20 Years Running the National Enquirer, former Enquirer editor Iain Calder remembers the paper's eccentric editor and publisher, Generoso P. Pope Jr., floating this idea at a staff meeting sometime in the '70s.

"Wouldn't it be great to have our own country, perhaps an island, where we could all live and work together, rule ourselves, and even print our own stamps and money?" he said. "We could have stores, movie theaters, churches, in a Caribbean paradise, where it would be heaven to work and play. And we could call it Enquirerland!"

Pope never did get around to seceding, but decades later the media landscape looks a lot like Enquirerland. The afternoon I wrote this paragraph, the front page of CNN.com featured Tiger Woods, Jessica Alba's plans to adopt, emmitt smith's family tree has slave owner; harnessing the power of bugs for profit; and 19 celebs who have adhd. There was also some fine print about earthquakes in Mexico, explosions in Pakistan, the space shuttle, the Catholic Churchbut the weird mix of stories getting the push was pure Enquirer. The news is infringing on tabloid turf like never before; why shouldn't a tabloid win an award for making news?

On a Monday morning in mid-April, five hours before the Pulitzer announcements, Levine is not exactly confident. Champagne has been neither purchased nor chilled. But a week or so ago, on a cruise in St. Martin, Levine did buy a fine Cuban cigar; he plans to smoke it if they win.

"And maybe if we don't," he adds.

1. Nearly every page of Levine's personal copy of Sarah Palin's Going Rogue appears to be marked with a colorful tape-flag.